DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY?

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIII, Issue 14191, 28 April 1919, Page 4

DEMOCRACY OR AUTOCRACY?

The Hospital Board in its combined wisdom and by a substantial majority has decided that the maternity home should be on the hospital grounds. Having examined the plans and heard the arguments, pro and eon, we arc convinced that the decision is a wise one. Some professing democrats in the cominunity:—many of whom have never seen the plans nor given careful consideration to the details—have gone behind the Hospital Board and invoked the Minister of Public Health to interpose his veto upon the will of the people’s representatives. Mr Russell, who is by profession a democrat but by inclination an autocrat, has intimated that if the wishes of the minority are not complied with he will not auhoriso a Government grant for the rounding off of the splendid building scheme —- including a magnificently situated and equipped maternity department —which the Board had planned. We are satisfied that the objections to a maternity ward at tiro hospital are fanciful and punctilious, but even if that ivere not the ease this innovation of a political bogey man by insistent minorities to thwart the wishes of local majorities is a boomerang device capable of most disconcerting results. There is more and more a tendency on the part of centralised autocracies —men in little brief authority—to interpose their vetoes on this, that or the other. The Department of Education has become a bureaucracy; the Department of Health is a law unto itself; the Minister of Public Works speaks w r ltb oracular voice; the Department of Agriculture is far beyond the influence or control of the people it is supposed to serve. And so right on dovrn the line. But when we hear Mrs Gill, a Labour candidate, rejoicing over a Ministerial veto upon local control, as though it were a triumph, we are "given furiously to think. ’’